Del Toro Shares His Lost Screenplay List

Filmmakers are often attached to multiple projects at any one time because films take years of development before they’re ready to begin production, and that’s assuming there’s no unexpected hurdles from financing issues to talent scheduling windows and so forth.

Multiple elements have to align for a film to proceed, so it comes as no surprise many directors have long lists of ‘might have been’ projects – films either partly or fully scripted but which have yet to make it much beyond that point. Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro is famous for having one of the longest lists of that type, his name attached to many projects over the years.

He recently took to Twitter to lament and list the sheer amount of time ‘lost’ on film and television projects that he spent serious time developing and writing but didn’t get the green light for. The projects, many of which he co-wrote, includes:

del Toro explains that each of these projects has a completed script at the very least and adds: “each script takes about a year, so more than a decade of work lost (in the case of ‘Mountains’, much more, since we scouted and designed etc).” It’s an understandable effort to explain why the filmmaker doesn’t have a new project every year when he could have with the demand for his work. del Toro is next slated to helm “Pinocchio” for Netflix.